Paranoia - Use in Modern Psychiatry

Use in Modern Psychiatry

In the DSM-IV-TR, paranoia is diagnosed in the form of:

• paranoid personality disorder
• paranoid schizophrenia (a subtype of schizophrenia)
• the persecutory type of delusional disorder, which is also called "querulous paranoia" when the focus is to remedy some injustice by legal action.

According to clinical psychologist P. J. McKenna, "As a noun, paranoia denotes a disorder which has been argued in and out of existence, and whose clinical features, course, boundaries, and virtually every other aspect of which is controversial. Employed as an adjective, paranoid has become attached to a diverse set of presentations, from paranoid schizophrenia, through paranoid depression, to paranoid personality—not to mention a motley collection of paranoid 'psychoses', 'reactions', and 'states'—and this is to restrict discussion to functional disorders. Even when abbreviated down to the prefix para-, the term crops up causing trouble as the contentious but stubbornly persistent concept of paraphrenia."